To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, ‘to lose one woman besotted with good food may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’
But this is how London, and the wider world, must feel after the sad deaths in the last fortnight of Rachel Cooke, a wonderful Observer journalist on every topic other than football and, inter alia, the world’s finest baker of Parmesan shortbreads, and of Skye Gyngell, chef, restaurateur and author. They were just 56 and 63 respectively and had been ill for some time.
Both found their way to London from very different origins. Rachel was from Up North, Sheffield to be precise, and she never lost her northern appetite, her smile, nor her sense of humour. Skye was born in Australia and eventually made her way to London via Paris and then initially via cooking at her restaurant at Petersham Nurseries, south-west London.
It was Australia that first introduced Skye to me. After we had met, I mentioned that as a restaurateur in the 1980s I had known her late father, the irrepressible Bruce Gyngell, as a customer. She had wanted to know every detail. Bruce, having been so successful in Australia – he had introduced commercial television to the nation live in 1956 – had moved to London to revive the then-flagging TV AM.
Skye, in her twenties then, had obviously lost some contact with her father and wanted every detail I could volunteer, of which sadly there were very few. I remember him in a pink shirt holding forth in our barrel-vaulted room, the top floor of my restaurant; that he was very fond of good food and wine; that he had a huge laugh; and that L’Escargot’s maîtresse d’, Elena Salvoni, was about the only person who could quieten him down. Skye seemed to enjoy everything I could remember.
I wrote this review of Skye’s lovely restaurant Spring in 2014 in which I referred to her as a ‘mother hen’, like her counterparts Ruth Rogers at the River Café and Sally Clarke at Clarke’s.
This is a vital role in any successful restaurant; one made more difficult as individuals open more than one site. It is this attention to detail that distinguishes the very best from the rest.
The late Jean-Claude Vrinat used to demonstrate this at Taillevent in Paris, which proves that this charm is not restricted to women. There are others, happily. I am thinking of Katie Exton at Lorne in London’s Pimlico, and the chef in charge of the restaurant I will be reviewing tomorrow.
It was an attribute that Skye had in spades which we will miss as much as her menu-writing, her exceptionally fresh style of cooking, and her campaign that made Spring the first single-use-plastic-free restaurant in 2019.
But most of all I will miss Skye and Rachel’s smiles. They could light up London.
